MIT PGP Public Key Server

Extracting a key

Type the text you want to search for in the ``Search String''
box. If you want to look up a key by its hexadecimal KeyID, you have
to prefix the ID with 0x

Select either the ``Index'' or ``Verbose Index'' check box. The
``Verbose'' option will display signatures on keys.

Press the ``Do the search!'' button.

The server will return a list of keys matching the search text.
The page will have links for every KeyID, and every bracket-delimited
identifier (i.e. <marc@mit.edu>). Clicking on the hypertext link will
display an ASCII-armored version of the public key.

Extract caveats

The search engine is not the same as that used by the pgp
program. It will return information for all keys which contain all
the words in the search string. A ``word'' in this context is a
string of consecutive alphabetic characters. For example, in the
string marc@mit.edu, the words are marc,
mit, and edu.

This means that some keys you might not expect will be returned. If
there was a key in the database for Marc Edu
<mit.foo.com>, this would be returned for by the above
query. If you don't want to see all these extra matches, you can
select ``Only return exact matches'', and only keys containing the
specified search string will be returned.

This algorithm does not match partial words in any case. So,
if you are used to specifying only part of a long name, this will no
longer work.

Currently, hypertext links are only generated for the KeyID and
for text found between matching brackets. (It's a common convention
to put your e-mail address inside brackets somewhere in the key ID
string.)